Take a trip down memory lane with the following video. The trip begins with some of the first Atari 2600 television advertisements and continues with almost 20 years of video game commercials. This great compilation of ads reminds us of our gaming past with legends like Mickey Mantle selling on demand intellivision, and Phil Hartman playing a wide range of characters for Philips CD-i. There is even a young Tobey Maguire cutting class to play the huge Atari Lynx in the boys room.

Some great early ads demonstrate families playing video games together, while classic GameBoy ads remind adults that your never to old to play games. The video comes to a end with Jaguar & Sega’s crass advertisements during the 90’s that I remember liking at the time, actually were really pretty awful.

Beginning with the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) this video depicts the evolution of Nintendo’s home video game consoles using a cool transformer type transitions.

The Irate Gamer reviews the cartridge M.U.S.C.L.E. for the 8-bit NES. The review is fair enough comparing it to other games of it’s time period like Nintendo’s Pro Wrestling and Data East/Namco’s Ring King. Watch the following video and get ready for a bit of nostalgia.

While viewing find a very funny cut scene at 5’18” - wtf are they doing?!?

Watch Bo Jackson run circles around the defense before scoring a touchdown. Note that the team was the Patriots (the worst team in the game), still Bo Jackson was pretty much invincible in this 8-bit NES classic.

From Wikipedia:

In Tecmo Super Bowl, each team had roughly 30 different players. Each team had 11 players that played defense, a kicker, a punter, and seventeen offensive players. Due to the expanded rosters, a team would field 11 players at a time during actual game play.

In addition to using real teams and players, TSB incorporated the full-length 1991 NFL regular season schedule for the game. The playoff format, including the Super Bowl and the post-season Pro Bowl games, was also used.

Tecmo Super Bowl retained the arcade-style football gameplay of the original which included the ability to break tackles. However, the game added new features, such as statistics tracking that included All-Time NFL season records, expanded and editable playbooks, fumbles, and player injuries. As it had previously, the game used cutscenes for important events like touchdowns and halftime shows. Tecmo Super Bowl also added cutscenes when injuries or big plays occurred.

ScrewAttack compiled this top 10 list of best games and franchises that managed to take a great 2D game and ruin it when making the jump to the third dimension. I think they made some good choices… can you think of any games that should have been included on this list? Let’s hear your opinions in our forum or leave a comment.

PSU has created a selection of montages to illustrate this ‘evolution’ of gaming. Check out the 1st generation up to the the most current generation of your favorite video game franchises.

Click the image below to see a larger version.

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